FSMLabs Updates TimeKeeper

According to Victor Yodaiken, CEO of FSMLabs, typical server clocks are difficult to synchronize and can drift off by as much as half a second or a second throughout the day, which can lead to difficulties. "If you have 1,000 servers in a datacenter and you want to reconstruct an audit trail accurately, the only way to do this is to have every system operating synchronously," he explains. "If [the various server clocks] slip a few milliseconds, you may have thousands of transactions going on in one machine in a different order than from another machine."

Much of the timing uncertainty can be attributed to the effects of network latency on the delivery of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) timing messages to consuming servers.

"Typical implementations of NTP do a great job for the environment for which the protocol was designed, such as a 1980s university computer science department," says Yodaiken. "When you are doing millions of transactions per day around the world, it is completely inadequate." FSMLabs clients are now asking for server-clock synchronicity within a window of 10 microseconds, he adds.

TimeKeeper replaces legacy NTP-based synchronicity software with a piece of software that resides on the server and receives the outside time signal-typically a time signal pulled down from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. The client software that resides on the server consumes the time signal and synthesizes the proper time for the local server. "We use NTP messages because we don't want users to have to redesign their networks to use a new time protocol," says Yodaiken.

The new features in the new release include support for versions 1 and 4 of NTP. "We already supported versions 2 and 3 of the protocol, which are the most commonly deployed," says Yodaiken. Also included is a new resiliency feature that will deal with network interruptions and breakdown of GPS radio time signals.

Users tend to deploy TimeKeeper software on a per-datacenter basis, according to Yodaiken. "If a firm has a server in Hong Kong and another in New York pulling time down from the GPS satellites, they will be within a few microseconds of each other."

Currently, the platform supports most distributions of the Linux operating system (OS). "We had anticipated that we would have versions out for Windows and Solaris, but we haven't run into customer demand for it yet," says Yodaiken. "People interested in such granular time issues tend to write to the Linux or Solaris application programming interface (API), since they can be written to a more granular level."

Rob Daly